Re: [Texmacs-dev] TeXmacs and font caches

[Ralf Treinen]

On Thu, Dec 15, 2005 at 08:56:40AM +0100, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 14, 2005 at 09:47:09PM +0100, Ralf Treinen wrote:
> > currently, TeXmacs stores pk and tfm files in the users's home
> > directory,  that is in $TEXMACS_HOME_PATH/fonts/{tfm,pk}. Is there
> > any particular reason for this? On a reasonably configured system,
> > mktexpk and mktextfm use a system-wide cache directory
> > for this (on debian this is /var/cache/fonts, which is the 
> > location defined for this purpose by the File Hierarchy Standard).
> 
> The problem is that many systems are *not* reasonable
> (i.e. redhat and fedora) and the harm of not being able to generate
> a font in these cases is larger than the one of regenerating fonts
> for each user. This behaviour was changed recently, after I noticed
> that I could not use TeXmacs on several machines at the free software
> meeting in Dijon this summer.

OK. For debian I will try to switch back to using /cache/fonts, but
I first I have to find out whether I can trust /cache/fonts to be
writable, or whether I have to provide a fallback to the users
home directory.

> > I recently had a debian user complain about this behaviour of
> > TeXmacs' (he is right). Using a system-wide cache directory
> > has the advantage that generated fonts are shared with other
> > programs (like TeX) and/or with other users on the same
> > machine. The patch would look something like the one attached.
> > Does anyone see problems with changing TeXmacs' behaviour in
> > this sense?
> 
> Anyway, we now use Type 1 fonts as much as possible,
> so the problem should be less acute. I therefore insist on
> creating a dependency on the extra font package with Type 1 fonts.

I'll have a look at this. Maybe the dependency can be satisfied
from font packages which already exist in debian.

Cheers -Ralf.